Black-ish, loosely based on the life of showrunner KenyaBarris, centers on an upper-middle-class black man (Anthony Anderson) who struggles to raise his children with a sense of cultural identity despite constant contradictions and obstacles coming from his liberal wife, old-school father and his own assimilated, color-blind kids.

"Instead of calling it TheBurbs or New Rules or something like that, we wanted to reflect that this is the world we are living in," Barris said. "I feel like my kids are a little bit of a lesser version of what I remember the ideology of what black was. At the same time, all of their friends — who are mostly nonblack kids — are a little bit more black than I remember. They're sort of black-ish, all their little friends, and my kids are sort of black-ish. We're living in a world where Asian culture has influenced us and Latino culture has influenced us, and youth culture is so homogenized to a point where, if you look from our main character's point of view, he sees the world as sort of black-ish — everyone is a little bit of a layering of each other."

Black-ish, which the cast hopes will be compared to The Cosby Show,premiered last week in the prime post-Modern Family time slot and drew a strong 3.3 rating among adults 18-49 and 10.8 million total viewers, retaining most of its lead-in and besting all recent attempts at comedy in that slot for the network.